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31 1 Backs, Suddenlys, and Surveillance   The back is the most awful and mysterious thing in the universe: it is impossible to speak about it. It is the part of man that he knows nothing of; like an outlying province forgotten by an emperor. It is a common saying that anything may happen behind our backs: transcendentally considered the thing has an eerie truth about it. . . . But this mystery of the human back has again its other side in the strange impression produced on those behind.1 These are the words of the English detective writer Gilbert Keith Chesterton describing his fascination with the unknown figured as space behind our backs and its impact on those who happen to be located there. The observation was inspired by the Victorian artist G. F. Watts’s paintings of the human figure from behind. In Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), a metaphysical detective novel about bomb-throwing anarchists, police agents, and detectives, Syme—the man who becomes Thursday—remembers seeing Sunday, the godlike master conspirator, for the first time from his sinister back: When I first saw Sunday, [. . .] I only saw his back; and when I saw his back, I knew he was the worst man in the world. His neck and shoulders were brutal, like those of some apish god. [. . .] When I see the horrible back, I am sure the noble face is but a mask. [. . .] I was suddenly possessed with the idea that the blind, blank back of his head was his face—an awful, eyeless face staring at me! And I fancied that the figure running in front of me was really a figure running backwards, and dancing as he ran. Syme concludes in his disquisition on the back that we know the world only from this perspective: “That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud” and so on. “We see everything from behind,” claims Syme, “and it looks brutal,” but if only we could locate the front of the world it will appear radiant to us.2 What makes Chesterton’s comments about the back and his representation of Sunday noteworthy for us is that Bely’s Petersburg, written a few years later, also features the back as its most prominent body part, equal in reference only to the lips.3 We remember the repulsive salmonlike lips of the double agent Lippanchenko, Apollon Apollonovich’s grotesque greenish ears, and Gogolian noses in the crowds on Nevsky and other Petersburg streets, but we probably don’t remember the backs.4 An online search of the text corroborates my claim that they are more common in Petersburg than ears and noses; noses are even located behind the back sometimes. Describing the rushing people on the streets of the city, the narrator tells us that a nose was smashed on someone’s back. In Bely’s representation of the modern city, its anonymous inhabitants and individual pedestrians traverse the city by following other pedestrians, including the relentless swarming crowds, from behind. Despite the multiple references to lips, the back carries greater meaning in the novel than any other body part, both in narrative and symbolic terms. Though there are fewer references to it, the mouth, discussed in the next chapter, is the only possible exception. There are more than 120 references to the back, not including the spine and spinal fluid, back of the head, shoulders, tail, and other semantically related lexical items.5 Fyodor Stepun’s analysis of the novel in 1934 reveals a similar readerly intuition: “Not only souls, but even bodies are taken apart: we see only heads, shoulders, noses, backs of heads, backs,” he writes, emphasizing, except for the nose, not the front of the body but its back.6 The first recorded comparison of Petersburg and The Man Who Was Thursday is by Roman Timenchik, who, according to Yury Tsivian, noted the affiliation of brain and bomb in both novels.7 As Alexander Lavrov has shown recently, Bely did read Chesterton’s novel, but he could not have done so before writing Petersburg, reading the work probably only in 1916. The Man Who Was Thursday was translated into Russian in 1914, after the publication of Petersburg in serial form, and Bely did not know English well enough to have read Chesterton’s novel in the original.8 The similarities between the two novels are indeed quite remarkable. Beside the...

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